Every spring, somewhere in the English Midlands, you can walk a footpath that has existed for six hundred years, running directly through someone’s garden.
The Ordnance Survey map shows it. The right-of-way is legally protected. The homeowner, politely, or irritably, asks you to go round. You do not. Because the path was there before the house, and the house was built knowing that.
This is one of the last visible traces of a world Parliament spent a century dismantling. The path remains because footpaths were hard to extinguish. Everything else; the right to graze the common, to glean the stubble fields after harvest, to cut wood from the lord’s forest, to fish the river, hunt small game, or to gather peat from the fen is gone.
Replaced by fences. Replaced by title deeds. Replaced by the word property, which sounds like it belongs to the person but means, in practice, that you do not.
